Such sweet sorrow

Mary and I took Natalie to the airport on Saturday after Thanksgiving, and she was sad again about leaving home, so we were too. I explained to her that everybody said it was normal for kids to feel this way their first year of college, according to my panel of experts, to wit, Leslie and Hilary. Natalie said she wasn't homesick at Yale, only when she was leaving home.

Then on Sunday she texted me and asked permission to apply for a trip to Peru over spring break to learn about environmental and oceanographic and other stuff. I of course said that would be cool. She used a number of exclamation points in her text, as is the style.

So I think that she is essentially in a pretty good place. She is basically happy where she is, be it home or college, and excited about going other places. I wish the same could have been said for me at that age.


Meanwhile, yesterday evening Graham suggested that, instead of starting Boardwalk Empire, that we should watch Twelve Angry Men, the 1957 film starring Henry Fonda, with a young Jack Klugman in a supporting role. We meant to watch just the first half of it, but watched the whole thing instead. We hope this may signal a turn towards more sophisticated content on his part. Lord knows he has the noggin for it.

Maintenance day

It is glum and rainy, so I have been doing things like

• Upgrading malware protection on my computer (why is the fan running all the time? suspicious)
• Deleting apps from my phone, including Facebook
• Checking some financial records, including bases in Roth IRAs (just cuz I saw them there in a folder on my computer) and report from Social Security administration
• Reading periodicals that are clogging up flat spaces in the house, including article on Long-Term Care and the survey on competition in the most recent issue of The Economist 
• I really need to 
• connect my new phone to my car using Bluetooth, although the weather makes me not want to go out in the driveway
• go to the gym
• challenge Graham to a game of chess
• figure out the next thing Graham and I will watch on Netflix or Amazon
• replace some burned out light bulbs

In a little while we will have lunch with Leslie and her family, and then I will take Natalie to the airport. Then there's the question of eating the Thanksgiving leftovers, which I presume will be a Sunday night thang with mom

After which it will be back to reality.

Relative humility

After five years or so of having the book, I finally made my way to the end of the complete Berkshire Hathaway shareholders letters, 1965-2012. There was much learning to be had about a variety of subjects.

Towards the end, the most interesting comparison probably is with the biography of Jimmy Clayton, founder of mobile home manufacturer (and finance company) Clayton Homes. Buffett praised the book in a letter from 2003 describing his acquisition of Clayton at the time -- a transaction that was part of the collapse of the manufactured home market due to crappy lending, an harbinger of the later housing crisis.

So I went out and bought Clayton's book and eventually read it. It was good for a while, though marred at the beginning by the obligatory chapters about growing up dirt poor in Tennessee and about how he and his parents weren't at all prejudiced against black people. Then it got much better, as he told stories of building his various businesses, together with his brother, of trials they went through together, clever things they did, how hard they worked, how they had good and bad partners, etc. All told, the middle of the book is quite good and full of learnings.

After a while, however, Clayton started believing his own press and talking about how he spent his money. He talked at reasonable length about "giving back", including a fairly detailed discussion about some Knoxville hospital he gave money too and how he wrangled with them about the naming rights. Like I could give a fuck.

Compare Buffett's giving. Yes, he has been very public about it, but he explicitly decided to give to the Gates Foundation as opposed to building a big competitor organization because he figured Bill and Melinda were doing a good job -- as they seem to be. But he has also been public so as to recruit more rich people to the Giving Pledge, which has to date secured pledges totaling $365 billion, which is non-trivial money.

It is clear that Buffett is not without ego, and that his public persona is pretty carefully shaped and crafted. But fundamentally he seems pretty much to be what he appears to be. I think he works hard to take care of other peoples' money and do good things, and that he husbands his time carefully and reads a lot. Which I respect.

Now I need to read Buffett's letters from 2013-2018 from the pdfs posted on Berkshire's web site. Then I'll be all caught up.

Rainy day, teen chatter

Grey morning, not really excited about getting out of bed. I was upstairs getting ready for the day when it occurred to me that I should really take Graham to the bus stop at the top of the hill and sit in the car with him till the bus got there. Because I can, really, that's all.

But I was behind the curve. Graham ran out into the street and then headed -- down the hill. WTF? Made no sense. In any case, I put my coffee in a travel cup and hustled out to the Prius, and then went down the hill to see what was up. He was down at Tyler's house, coming out of his front door with an umbrella. Seems he and Tyler -- who normally rides his bike to school -- had texted, and Graham was to accompany him up the hill to the bus, which Tyler had never taken.

So they hopped in the back and we drove up the hill, and I got to listen to them natter about goings on, homework assignments, clubs, what have you. It was lovely, again, a great luxury to be able to do it. When the bus finally arrived, the sisters who go to the bus stop about whom Graham had told us --citing them as the rationale for walking all the way to the top of the hill as opposed to waiting for the bus at the most natural spot on Markham -- got out of their mom's Odyssey, and Graham greeted them heartily: "Hello!"

We often worry about kids on the spectrum -- and even kids not on the spectrum -- these days. They seem to isolate in their rooms with their devices a little too much. So it's good to see them in their element, knitting together.

Probably we should consider switching off the wireless router for at least a portion of Sundays, as one family we know does, and as is the fashion in Silicon Valley.

Compost pile

Our compost pile has some good features, and some bad ones. On the good side, it's very easy to dump stuff into it, I just walk out onto my deck and throw stuff down. On the negative, it's hard to flip the matter that's in there, so it takes forever to break down, and gets really dense, and never makes it to the magical fluffiness that we achieved in Princeton in our composting wheel. Nor do I get the magnificent steaming of the pile when I flipped it with a pitchfork.

I could replicate what I had in Princeton, but it would have go out into the back of the yard, which would make taking stuff out there much more of an ideal.

But would that be so bad? There was something magical about taking the compost into the yard in Princeton. Probably it was bound up with the improbability of our yard, of having that much land (about a third of an acre) right there in town, particularly when the stand of trees was still there, before our legal tussles with the Barskys over their planned development, which eventually ended in the felling of all the trees and their building four McMansions across the fence from us.* Our yard felt like a mythical space, particularly if I had just come home from Manhattan or had flown back from Nebraska or something. Kind of like the great woods behind Glen Heights, but on a much smaller scale. And, in the back of my mind, I knew that both Sir Thomas Kuhn and Aaron Burr had -- at different times, obviously -- lived just on the other side of the woods, lending them a certain allure.

Don't get me wrong, my current backyard is also pretty cool. But the experience of it differs, probably by the fact our home is much more open to the natural environment here, so the inside/outside distinction is lessened. In general, we got more of it here in NC. New Jersey is really the Garden State only in its mind.



*This struggle is probably at some level narrated back in the 2004-2005 entries in the Grouse, but it is not easily keyword findable, and I don't have time to go spelunking for it.

Not atypical

I spent a good portion of yesterday -- beautiful fall weather notwithstanding -- working on Natalie's FAFSA and CSS/Profile (financial aid forms, for those of you blessed with ignorance of these acronyms). Partially because I need to lead a workshop on financial planning for college tomorrow evening and I figured it would help me get back down into those insect-rich weeds.

A week or so back Natalie had nudged me "shouldn't we be working on my financial aid application?", and I of course knew that the forms had become available for the upcoming academic year on October 1. But I had not looked at Yale's web site to see when they were due. I felt kind of certain that I was ahead of the game in getting them done in November.

But only kind of certain, not certain. And -- as I turned off the light to go to bed, I had this nagging suspicion that I should have looked to see when they were due. In earlier years this might have stopped me from sleeping, but I was tired from the day, which also involved getting up on the roof to push down leaves, running, watching crappy television with Graham, and a few pages of Knausgaard, quickly becoming the bane of my existence.

When I woke up and began my morning routine, the thought returned to me. What if I'm running late on the application? I went to Yale's financial aid site and saw that -- the timeline for financial aid forms for the upcoming school year will be posted at some time in the future. I was good.

So this is how I live my life.

One other detail of the zoo trip -- for the archives

So when I chaperoned Graham's class trip to the zoo a couple of weeks ago, I was in line behind Graham at lunch. I was waiting for my order to get ready, and I turned and saw that Graham had reached into his bag and gotten out his wallet so he could pay for his lunch.

No doubt the instructions for the trip had said that kids should either bring their lunch or money to pay for lunch and Graham -- ever the good rule follower -- had done just that. Never mind that his dad was standing behind him in line.

I squared it up with him and explained that there was really no need for him to have done that. Such a silly boy.

Shifting gears

With the elections in the rearview, it seems the holidays are pretty much upon us, but I am happy to largely take this weekend off to do battle with leaves, etc. And it seems the gods are smiling upon me. A soccer game scheduled for 9am that had been moved up to 8 was, blissfully, cancelled. I had already decided to sit it out due to some gimpiness around my left knee, and to go to my Saturday morning meeting. Turned out I had made the right decision.

For sure, there are tasks piling up around me: college financial aid applications, Obamacare enrollment, work, trip planning blah blah blah blah blah.

Today I will do my best to ignore that stuff. I need to do some reading, some napping, some leaf raking, maybe, just maybe, read something for Mary. I may convince Mary and Graham (both sticks deep in  mud) to go to a movie in the evening.

Off to my left, our cat Rascal is setting a good example for me. She has curled up in the sun in the reading chair next to my desk. I am headed there too.

But first, must schedule a tennis court for Monday morning...

Recovering

A few days out from the mid-terms, a few thoughts. Democrats are claiming victory where we can, and we made some progress, but it is tenuous and concentrated in that most slippery of places, the House. Yes we got some governorships, yes, Anita Earls to the NC Supreme Court, etc.

But it was not the wholesale taking back of our country that we thought it was, and Trump has clearly taken the shakiness of our progress as validating his position, and the next day fires Sessions and puts a half-assed lackie in his place. So last night some of us took to the streets and protested again.

I know what the Republicans are thinking right now: knock yourself out. That's sort of what we've done.

There's a Republican I am Facebook friends with, an older white guy (surprise surprise) who -- in the weeks leading up to the election -- was posting about the relaxing golf trip he took down to the beach, what a great time he was having. Wink wink nudge nudge. Meanwhile, we were canvassing, phone banking, text banking, virtue signaling, all in an effort to dredge up more votes from our core constituencies.

The Republicans just showed up at the polls. They didn't even have many yard signs out, relative to what we had.

Admittedly, we are working against a good deal of intentional, structural efforts to contract the franchise all over the country, Georgia first and foremost, but ND, NE, and here in NC (moving polling places and closing DMVs, etc). And gerrymandering. These are real impediments, they fly in the face of the spirit of democracy. They are just wrong.

We have marched, called, kibbutzed amongst ourselves, etc. What we have not done is figure out a way to have convincing conversations with those who disagree with us. And a large part of that is going to be accepting that they have valid concerns and that we do not have a monopoly on virtue or rectitude. For the most part, we haven't really tried. I tried a little just after the 2016 elections, but then I fell back into my silo of trying to make a living and be a good family member and community member, exercise, etc.

To go further, I think we need to do more.

On the hoof

Out canvassing on Saturday, I talked to one 65-year old man who was voting for the first time, an African-American guy. He was voting straight Democrat, but at the same time he said that the Democrats really didn't have a unified message except for "sticking up for the gays" or something like that.

The fact is, it is hard to argue with him. We do not have a clear, unified message like "Make America Great Again (ps. we are under attack from all sides by terrorists, gays, Jews, and people who want to take your guns and trucks away)." The problem is that complexity is a much tougher sell than simplicity, and we don't have a great message right now. Last time we did ("Yes we can") we had a beautiful leader, a beautiful moment, but Fox News organized around sniping and negativity and -- having a near-monopoly on the conservative eyeball, they wore us down.

It is also true that, two years after the election of Trump, we haven't done a good job crossing over and building bridges with the Trump base. He has done a good job ringfencing their attention, and we haven't done much to convince them that we are on their side. We have essentially doubled down on the "demography is destiny" and coalition of the disaffected thesis, while the Republicans work ever more aggressively to restrict the franchise. In NC, when the voter ID amendment passes, the Republicans will move aggressively to defund DMVs and make it harder to get voter IDs.

There's a lot of work left to do.

One other note from Saturday. I walked the same knock list I had walked on election day 2016, or at least 50 odd doors of it, and I was struck again by the amount of trash in the woods. Styrofoam cups from Popeye's etc. Going implausibly deep in the woods, 20-30 feet, further than can be plausibly thrown. It's as if somebody walked back in there to take a piss and then tossed it.

And this across the street from well-tended lawns. No ownership.

That's why I have to give credit to the Person County Democrats who led roadside pickup of trash days back in the summer. Nobody can fault people for picking up trash. It's just good citizenship.

Harvey Pitt, regulator redux

There's a story today in the NYTimes about how regulatory enforcement under Trump, especially the SEC, has seen a noticeable drop-off from the Obama era. It is a solid article, with appropriate and thoughtful caveating where appropriate, but its basic thrust seems well-documented and is not shocking.

What did surprise me is a quote from Harvey Pitt, who ran the SEC for a while under Bush before rolling out to start his own firm, which is now a consulting firm but back then was doing something around hedge funds. I saw him talk at a hedge fund conference in 2007, as I documented in this post. Back then, as I documented, Pitt didn't really envision the regulatory function of government as one that needed to be particularly proactive.

But today he is quoted in the Times as saying this: "The goal is really to instill in those who are regulated the illusion that the government is everywhere and looking over your shoulder. If you take away that threat, that could embolden some to keep breaking the law." I don't know what has occasioned this change of heart, but I for one ain't buying it.

Clumps of boys

Yesterday I chaperoned a trip to the NC Zoo with Graham's ECHHS Biology class. I got to manage a pack of ten boys, a couple of whom I have known through the years from Graham's birthday parties, etc. Graham isn't particularly tight with either of them.

Eight of the ten boys pretty much traveled in a clump, while the ninth held back and listened to music, but tried to fit in more or less. Graham kind of wants to, but just doesn't know how. Mimicking does not come naturally to him. He had a school assignment, and the strict instructions in the assignment were much more binding on him than what the other kids were doing.

Most of the boys were surprised that they had an assignment, and hadn't brought writing utensils. Graham had a stash of pencils big enough to lend to most of them.

At the animal exhibits, the boys would bunch together and comment and hoot and laugh: "Look at his ass!." "Dude, he's farting a big one!" Etc. This shit just doesn't come naturally to Graham.

I totally get it. I don't think it was entirely natural for me either. Mom recently said something to me about Graham being conscious of not fitting in. This is stuff I need to help him with, but it is very hard to coach. Except to have him hang with more guys more often. I think it is an area where he may just have to fake it till he makes it.